Octant 6 - Hephaestus (huh-FAY-stus)

Although dwarves and humans are stereotypical lineworkers in Hephaestus, all ancestries find something to work on in the octant.

Security guards and line workers are on constant watch in Hephaestus, and shifts are working at all hours of the night and day, barring major holidays. Most workers have a reserved attitude towards the Oracles, feeling that they don't do enough for the average worker, but they aren't hostile. Most Gearheads would rather handle issues themselves than deal with outsiders, and are more than capable of doing so, but they won't object to help solving mysteries.

Almost all trade goods made in factories are made in Hephaestus. Raw and recycled materials are imported from Hades, animal-based goods (wool, leather, etc) are imported from Demeter, and finished goods go out through Hermes. Researchers at the University of Apollo are regularly experimenting with new materials and LOStech for use in Hephaestus.

Hephaestus is almost nothing but infrastructure. Factories stand next to processing plants that stand next to warehouses. The factories of Hephaestus are working night and day, and people are always on their way to work or on their way home. Trucks and vans bring goods all over Olympia in the middle of the night so that new products will be on shelves by the time the store opens.   Although many of the buildings in Hephaestus were built by the Hephaestus Device at the same time as the rest of the city, over the past 200 years,many of the buildings have been demolished through civil war, siege, or because they did not fit the needs. These buildings have largely been replaced by multi-story brick factories.   Hephaestus's buildings are not all plain and industrial, however. The workers of Hephaestus take pride in their work, and often decorate the outside walls of their buildings with artwork and murals that inspire people as they walk by.

The Terminators

The Terminators (sometimes derisively called Robocops) started as a small security company calling themselves Cyberdyne Security Systems as a joke. The company began as washed out cyberjocks that were often more cyberwear than flesh from before people realized that too much cyberwear could kill you even if your body was technically still alive. Its clients soon realized that having someone that could stand on watch for hours at a time and record incidents as they happened was a boon too good to pass up, even if some Terminators could be a bit trigger happy.   The Terminators began purposefully recruiting people with more cyberware than sense, and have since become the number one security company in Hephaestus. While Terminators are not actively encouraged to shoot criminals, Cyberdyne Security Systems has also been known to have some of the best lawyers in Olympia.

When the LOStech cache was first discovered in 23DF, the Hephaestus Device was among the items of the cache. The Device, then no larger than a shipping container, was removed from the Ark and brought down to the settlement that would become the center of Olympia.   For 76 years, the device sat unopened and unactivated, along with the Manuals that no one could read. The device had been designed to be robust and self-replicate, and the starting diagrams designed with pictograms, but the gulf of cultures between the Ancients and the settlers just coming out of the Wasteland period was too vast to be readily understood.   The Device didn't have any apparent use until LOStech scholar Quinten Alpillan was able to make some minor repairs and figure out the arcane start procedures, which had included directions for finding the center of the new city.   From that point on, the device was unstoppable as it began building the Inner Octants of Olympia. The Hephaestus Device continued for an entire year before it finally halted on its own and entered a much lower power state where the device began manufacturing basic tools for the Olympia settlers.

The Hephaestus Device

The Hephaestus Device is a marvel of Ancient engineering. This device, known in the Hephaestus manuals as a "3D Printer" is the size of four city blocks and is capable of making any simple device or part that it has a pattern and material for. Complex patterns, such as almost all LOStech items, seem to be beyond what the device is capable of recreating, though researchers from Apollo have been able to add items to its pattern library by using examples.   The Device, once activated in the year 99DF, began its operation by building the Helepolis. It then used the megastructure to begin devouring the local mountain in order to build the Inner Octants from molten rock. The device ran entirely uninterrupted, day and night, for a year before halting itself and entering a lower power state in what became known as the Hephaestus Octant.   While many basic tools and parts were built from the Hephaestus Device in the beginning, it became apparent as the city grew that it was faster and easier to use the device to build tooling instead to reserve time spent printing for parts that were harder to produce. Today, over two hundred years later, the Hephaestus Device still continues to print new products with only minimal human intervention.